Title: Around SaraAuthor:clair_de_luneFandom: Prison BreakCharacters, pairings: Sara/Veronica, Sara/LJ (one-sided), Sara/Lincoln, MichaelCategories: Het, femslashRating: RWord Count: ~ 2400Disclaimer: Not mine. Just borrowing them for a while.Summary: Three slices of Sara’s affairs with the Burrows’ clan.Author’s Note: This is Fic #1 for maerhys who bid on my ficlets offering at help_pakistan.

Many thanks to badboy_fangirl for the beta and for her suggestions. Any remaining mistakes are due to my stubbornness.

She’s close, sometimes merely a few yards away, unaware of his presence; he expects to keep things that way. He would find himself creepy in his once-in-a-while observations if he wasn’t animated with the best intentions. Not that his best intentions have never caused injury and collateral damage before, so he can only hope it’s the right decision. He’s pretty sure it is.

He doesn’t linger; he just enters her orbit every now and then to make sure everything is fine, wary not to collide with her path.

She’s never had such circumspection about colliding paths. She has crossed, accompanied or redirected those of the people he most cares about in entire the world.

-Veronica-

Veronica can’t even remember how she’s ended up here. It’s the friend of a friend of a friend [ad lib.]’s party. It’s dark and noisy in the house, and she may be drunker than she’s ever been in her life. She’s sprawled out in a small armchair in the master bedroom, talking to a woman who listens to her with benevolence. Or maybe it’s indifference?

Benevolence. Totally. The brown eyes trained on her shine with warmth and care. There’s also a blur in them, a lack of focus, because the girl is high as a kite – Vee ought to know how someone who’s high as a kite looks – but it doesn’t remove the warmth and care, nor the fact that she listens.

“My boyfriend would love you. Ex-boyfriend,” Vee slurs in a serious tone, her lawyer, reasonable tone. “He loves pretty redheads. He loves them so much, as a matter of fact, that he fucked one not later than this afternoon. That’s how much Lincoln is fond of pretty redheads.” She cocks her head, pushes her small chin forward and squints her eyes against her drunkenness as well as against the half-darkness of the room in order to take a better look at the woman. “You’re prettier than her... Actually, you’re beautiful.”

She is. Although her hair could use a good wash. And she could use a good stay in a rehab center. Veronica feels her heart constrict: if Redhead keeps this shit up, she won’t stay as beautiful as she is for long, and the blur in her eyes will take over the warmth and care. She wants to tell her that, warns her about that, but the woman cuts off anything Vee is about to say. In a fluid motion, she slides down the bed she’s been sitting on with her legs crossed underneath her, and falls onto her knees in front of Veronica.

She kisses her on the mouth. No hesitation or trepidation. She tastes sour, but Vee doesn’t care because, this set aside, it’s a really nice kiss. She’s kissed by a woman who knows what she’s doing – and who licks down her throat and between her breasts as she opens her shirt before Vee can have enough of the on-the-mouth delicious kiss. Tease. Her hands slip, cold and fast, under Vee’s skirt, lift Vee’s right leg and carefully hook it on the arm of the armchair. She fondles every spot she can reach in the awkward position Veronica is, and she makes it last and last and last... Or maybe it’s just a couple of minutes, and Vee has lost any notion of time. Her time awareness is messed up right now; booze and hornyness can do that to a girl. She thrashes, grips the arms of the chair to steady herself – her ass is sliding off the padded seat – and gasps.

She gasps because Redhead’s mouth descends between her legs and latches onto her just when she can’t take it anymore and needs it there now; because the woman doesn’t give a damn that the door of the bedroom is open and that anyone can see them; because she’s fucking talented with her tongue; because she’s whispering appeasing sounds against the damp skin of Vee’s inner thighs; because...

Veronica comes with another, barely louder gasp, her soaked panties pushed to one side of her crotch, her leg dangling over the side of the armchair, her hips bucking uncontrollably and her fingers digging into long, messy red hair.

“Well,” Redhead says with a wicked smile – and it’s the first time Veronica actually hears her voice, loud and not so clear – “Now, you can tell to your boyfriend that a pretty redhead fucked you, and he wasn’t even there to enjoy the show.”

Vee laughs. Languid, struggling to move her arms and legs, she gets up and pushes the woman onto her back across the bed. Redhead is damn tall. She reclines willingly and lets Veronica settle on top of her. She welcomes her with literally open arms and legs. Her hair makes a halo of long twisted locks all around her head, and they move and tangle even more as Veronica kisses her and strokes her. Especially the kissing thing. She takes her time kissing her, feasting on her mouth, getting from her everything she teasingly denied Veronica earlier.

Two fingers delicately slipping into her ephemeral lover and her thumb drawing small circles: she must not be too bad at mirroring the gestures she usually uses on herself – for herself – because Redhead arches up and moans, begs and writhes into her touch. Vee loves, loves that, for a few minutes, the blur in her brown eyes has a different cause than whatever she shot into her veins tonight.

When the young woman speaks again, she’s breathless, her words laced with sexual satisfaction.

“Or you can tell to your boyfriend that you fucked a pretty redhead, and she really, really enjoyed it.”

* *

They don’t recognize each other. Vee was too drunk, Sara was too high and too different, hardly looking like the neat woman who knocks on the door of Nick Savrinn’s apartment years later to get Lincoln Burrows’ file from his lawyers.

The warmth and care in Dr. Tancredi’s sharp brown eyes are oddly familiar.

-LJ-

He thinks she walks with grace. She agrees about the grace, as long as it’s the grace of an elephant, and she laughs at him. She’s an eight month pregnant woman: ‘grace’ hasn’t been part of her vocabulary for a few months, and won’t be back in it before at least another one has passed.

LJ doesn’t mind the mockery. Firstly because it’s a gentle mockery; more importantly, because Sara laughed. Sara doesn’t laugh often or enough. More than you would expect from a woman in her situation – she’s the bravest person LJ knows – but still not often or enough.

He’s infatuated with his uncle’s wife.

Wait, scratch that. He’s infatuated with his uncle’s widow. Infatuated being an understatement. He doesn’t know if Uncle Mike being dead makes it worse or not; but the fact is that LJ wakes up from way too pleasant dreams, or daydreams, starring Sara. He can almost keep the daydreaming part in check; the dreaming part... nobody can blame him for the tricks his subconscious plays on him during his sleep, right?

The embarrassing feelings took root during the time Sara and he spent locked together in Panama, almost a year ago. She kept him alive. She made him talk, sustained him, and forbade him to lose hope when that crazy bitch was crazier than usual. Nothing unexpected, no big mysteries here. Knowing where his feelings come from doesn’t help to uproot them, though. It’s not the kind of thing you can put out in full light, scrutinize, examine and analyze with the expectation that logic and realism will save you.

He knows because he’s tried.

The roots matter less and less, anyway. The more he talks to her and spends time with her, the more what he feels finds a fertile mold to implant deeper, grow and blossom. The – partial – solution to the issue is as obvious as it is heartbreaking and not happening any time soon.

To put it bluntly, he’s screwed; to put it vulgarly, it’s not in the fun way. He’s smart enough to know it can’t, shouldn’t and won’t happen, and young enough not to shut down any hope it will happen.

She knows. When he rubs her back and shoulders because they hurt under the grace of her eight month baby bump, she quirks an eyebrow and tells him he doesn’t have to do this. She’s aware he’s not using those moments as an opportunity to touch her; he merely wants to help her to relax and feel better. The closeness, the warmth of her body seeping through her thin dress, the silk of her skin, the plunging view on her pulpy pregnant woman’s cleavage... as many things that constitute hell for him, albeit a pleasant one.

She waits for it to be naturally purged, expunged from his system. She seems to think, LJ doesn’t know why, that it will happen someday. She never encourages him, of course, but she never fights him either. She knows those Burrows men: it would be like waving a red flag at a bull. She’s just kind, patient and strong like that – and damn beautiful – and it only serves to make LJ love and want her more.

* *

At the hospital, after the baby is born and named Michael Junior – because everybody lacks imagination to name kids in this family – LJ leans down to kiss her cheek. She slightly slants her head, and his lips catch the corner of her mouth.

It’s the most he’ll get from her; that’s an unspoken statement.

Half a kiss, and the fact that she once helped him to stay alive.

-Lincoln-

He lies back on the bed that should be Michael’s and closes his hands around Sara’s waist to tug her down with him. She follows heavily, readily. She straddles him and bends forwards, her thighs silky and clasping him tight, her fingers digging into the muscles of his shoulders. The kiss she gives him matches the intensity of her embrace. Lincoln has learned to think and reflect upon consequences of his acts before making a decision, but he doesn’t think at all before pulling her into him and kissing her back. Call this instinct or lust, or give it a name he doesn’t want to spell out and that could open a damn can of worms. This is not going to be pretty, anyway. This idea makes the kiss and the eager caresses even better and hotter; spicier. ‘Spicy’ is the nice way to put things when you’re about to have sex with your sister-in-law, right?

You would think that if something should have happened between them, it would have been on that boat sailing off Miami to Costa Rica, after they’d watched the video Michael had left for them. A one-time comfort fuck, and once they’d passed the border, the memory of it would have been left in another country and in another life. Easy, almost expected, almost clean, almost wise. But nope. When Lincoln Burrows screws up, he really screws up; Sara’s not bad in that department either; so that ‘something’ happens a few months after Michael Jr. is born.

It started with her shivering on the couch they’d slumped into, exhausted rather than downright cold; he snaked his arm around her to warm her up and silently support her. It’s a gesture that has become natural. It’s one of the many things that have become natural in the recent months: him being around her and the baby so often, the teasing quality of her voice when she comments on his peculiar sense of fashion, her little idiosyncrasies, that red dress he likes seeing her wear a bit too much, the way she prefers her tea, the scent of her skin, the mess she makes in the bathroom when she’s just out of the shower... So many small things. She’s family, but those details are unsettling; pulling him into a brand of intimacy he’s not entirely entitled too.

It’s appealing, though, and it’s because it’s so appealing they’re now an entanglement of limbs and gasps in the sanctuary of her bedroom. She’s had nobody since Michael. Obviously. Lincoln knows it. The thought is deliciously wrong, and it burns him a bit harder when she whispers into his neck that it’s been so long.

He rolls her onto her back, slides down and kisses her stomach. It’s not as flat and firm as it used to be, probably won’t ever be again. The baby has left his marks; Michael has left his too, and they’re deep even though they’re not as clearly visible. He looks up and holds her eyes. She cants her hips and grinds into him, leaving wet traces of arousal and need on his skin. He delves lower; he could get used to her breathy whimpers.

Her hands around his neck, she motions him up and spreads her thighs wider to accommodate him. Her jolt of pleasure-discomfort halts him briefly; the roll of her hips and her threatening groan of “Don’t fucking stop or...” eggs him on. Her legs are high and tight around his waist, her mouth hard and demanding beneath his, her breasts slick with a sweat he’s eager to taste on his tongue.

* *

It is not pretty. Given what they are – should be – to each other, it means too much. They’ve waited too long to resort to the one-time-comfort-fuck excuse, or to chalk it up to retaliation and pretend that sleeping with each other is one way like another to metaphorically fuck Michael for his propensity for self-sacrifice. It has already evolved into something else, something that belongs only to them.

It happens again on the morning after, and one week later, and three days after, and... It happens in a variety of positions, places and moods, for a variety of reasons – and then without specific reasons – that disconcerts Lincoln.

That’s one string of mistakes he doesn’t regret.

-Michael-

For days that morph into weeks and stretch into months, Michael watches from a distance. He’s out of the loop, out of their sphere. Staying away, not being pulled into their attraction, is the hardest and easiest resolution he’s ever had to follow. Despite all he had to go through to get there, now that he can almost touch them – touch her – the last thing he wants is to disrupt the nascent balance of their lives or derail them from their route.

OMG THE END! ♥ I love this — every part of it — and of course, that Sara is the common link where Michael usually is just cuts in all the right ways. Truly beautiful, hot, and amazing, dear. I love it.

Since you've mentioned a couple of time shipping Sara with... so many people but Michael, I tried to use that ;) Happy you enjoyed.To be fair, the watching-from-afar ending was a suggestion from my beta. She was of good advice, obviously.

OH, SURPRISE TO SEE VEE&SARA PAIRING, AWESOME IDEA.I ENJOY THE SMUT VERY MUCH, NEXT TIME JANE&GRETCHEN(THEY ARE HOT AS HELL) ,OK?YEAH,I ALSO SHIP SARA WITH MANY PEOPLE BUT MICHAEL(HAHA,BROTHERCEST RULEZ,YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN),SO THE STORY IS JUST A GOOD TREAT TO ME, PLUS, MY FAVORITE PAIRING IS KELLERMAN&SARA(CHEMSTRY!!!). I THINK YOU DID A GREAT JOB AGAIN IN THIS STORY, I ALWAYS THINK SARA GOT HER BEST CHARM WHEN SHE FREELY DID WHAT SHE LIKES TO. SHE IS SUCH A GRACIOUS AND INDEPENDENT WOMAN AND SHOULD ENJOY HER LIFE AFTER THOSE SUFFERINGS. I REALLY LIKE LINC&SARA AS A COUPLE IN THE END, THEY ARE GOOD TOGHTHER BECAUSE THEY UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER.

Well, let's see... I wrote a tiny Jane/Gretchen drabble - although not smutty - in Looking for Sappho, and one-sided Sara/Kellerman in Not a Daydreamer. And there is some Sara/Jane and Sara/Gretchen around here too. Brothercest? I know what you mean ;)